Colony Survival News

Last week, we were talking about the planned overhaul. We were very enthusiastic, but we got quite some skeptical replies! We think we understand your concerns, and we hope we can convince you that we can prevent the feared issues from arising.

We believe Colony Survival is the most fun when you grow pretty large. Don’t stop at 20 colonists, recruit 200. Or 800. Or 1500! Of course, the game has to stay challenging, so the difficulty of the problems you face scale with you as your colony grows. Monsters keep becoming more numerous and stronger, you’ll need to produce more and more food, and overpopulation creates growing unhappiness that needs to be countered with happiness items.

But that means we’re punishing you for the thing we’re trying to encourage - growth. Currently, players are motivated to stay as small and as efficient as possible. Colonists have pretty high “upkeep costs” in the form of monsters, food and happiness items, so an inefficient colonist is a dangerous liability for the rest of the colony. In last week’s blog, we said we wanted to make things like textiles significantly more expensive. This would make a lot of current colonies unsustainable, with only the most efficient colonies surviving. This is not our goal!

While recruiting colonists is punished, there is another form of progress in the game that is actually extremely cheap. There is no durability or scientific regression in Colony Survival. Weapons and job blocks are usable for eternity, scientific unlocks will stay available and/or active until the end of time. While an inefficient colonist is a bad investment, these items and unlocks have infinite time to make a ‘profit’. No upkeep, no depreciation.

This means that raising the upkeep costs of colonists can literally make the game unplayable, but raising the cost of these “eternal improvements” could merely make the game… slow. And there’s a great way to boost your production in Colony Survival - recruit more colonists! That’s exactly what we want to encourage.



Currently, players will spend most of their time balancing things like the production of ammo, food and happiness items - the costs of having colonists. Unlocking things in the tech tree, or producing “eternal items” like weapons and job blocks, don’t require much items or time. A matchlock gun gets crafted in roughly 10 seconds, perhaps less. I’m not an expert, and it probably varied from gunsmith to gunsmith, but I’m pretty sure it took people a lot longer than that to craft a gun in medieval times, without machine tools or similar modern improvements.

So instead of having very high variable costs (punishing players for recruiting colonists and not being very efficient) and very low fixed costs (making it possible to complete the important part of the tech tree quite easily with only ~100 colonists), we want to overhaul the game to be more like the opposite. Crafting advanced items and unlocking end-game content should be a very substantial task that requires a huge colony with many workers, but these individual workers shouldn’t be too burdensome.

This shouldn’t exactly make the game easy or way less challenging, but we believe “setting up large scale production” is a more interesting challenge than “navigating the very unintuitive happiness menu and making exactly the right choices or your colony fails”.

We hope this is a better explanation, and we hope you’re also enthusiastic. If you are, or aren’t, please let us know in the comments or on Discord!



In the meanwhile, Zun has been continuing his work on improving the UI. He has added some nice small improvements that were pretty common requests: (not released yet)

• You can edit existing diplomacy rules
  
• You can close the quickstart menu with a close button instead of having to press F1 (was often problematic for Mac users)
  
• You can delete outdated worlds in the load menu now
  
• An in-game converter than can change SP worlds to co-op worlds and vice versa

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The Arch Temple by Saphrax, again


When we recently tested Colony Survival we were shocked to discover two things:

1. It’s possible to get pretty much to the endgame with only 100-150 colonists, while we want to encourage players to build colonies with at least 800-1000 colonists
   
2. Different parts of the tech tree have wildly different ingredients and prerequisites: there isn’t really a big major production chain that can be improved and expanded from the start of the game to the end

As talked about before, we want to change this dramatically. It’s a major overhaul so we’re still thinking and debating about the details. One thing we keep mentioning again and again in our discussions is “exponential”.

You’ve probably noticed that your expansion accelerates as you keep playing the game. Going from 0 to 50 colonists takes longer than going from 300 to 350 colonists. This is one source of exponential progress.

But we also want to introduce industrial tech that speeds up your production, and we want to add the “Repeating Scientist” who can boost the efficiency of certain jobs over and over again. This means that you’ll be able to dramatically expand your production.

That leads to a pretty difficult problem. We need to find a useful, consistent goal for these enormous capabilities. Something that is relevant both before and after the industrial revolution. Here are a couple of the things we’re thinking about:

Textiles

Textiles were a key industry during the industrial revolution. They were obviously important before that period though, and still highly useful today. Currently, making a piece of cloth in Colony Survival goes very quickly, and it has only limited usefulness. We want to make the initial cost of a piece of cloth a lot higher (but with the ability to improve your production) while requiring more of it in your production chains.

Steel precision parts

Humans have used metals in general and iron in specific for a very long time. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that in real life is hard to produce on a large scale - it also took until the industrial revolution until that was possible, although it was invented a lot earlier. We want to make the process of developing steel in Colony Survival more difficult and expensive as well. Large amounts of it will be necessary to develop industrial machines.

Another part of the metalworking problem is making precision parts. Think of the complex machinery in clocks and guns. This is something else that we can make more expensive in the beginning, but with the possibility to scale it up dramatically with tools like the lathe.

Data

The production and sharing of data is something that has been growing on an exponential scale for a very long time now. Just look at this graph of the production of printed books a couple of centuries ago:

Source


But that’s not a trend that is “over”, we’re still in the middle of rapid exponential progress. Here’s a graph of the current growth in digital data:

Source


We hope we’re able to combine these trends into a satisfying long term gameplay loop in Colony Survival. Instead of jumping from one disjointed part of the tech tree to another with completely different requirements, and completing all useful science with only 120 colonists, we want to make it so that there’s a satisfying path of continuously expanding production - producing lots of textiles for lots of colonists who use many hundreds of complex, expensive machines that assist in the production of more of these machines and in the production of lots of data, which can be used to improve the colony as a whole. We hope this sounds as good to you as it does to us!

At the moment, these are still plans, not things we're currently working on. We're still busy improving the interface. Here are two work-in-progress screenshots of changed menus:




Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The Arch Temple by Saphrax


This week, Zun continued revamping the code behind the UI, and his efforts are starting to bear fruit! Some of the “standard UI elements” that are reused in multiple places look a lot better now - in our opinion, of course. We’ll continue like this for a couple of weeks - the results until now seem well worth the effort, and there are plenty of other rough spots in the UI that need some tender loving care.

Currently, the Colony Tab is a list of ugly buttons. At first, we wanted to make it a list of beautiful buttons. But we just realized that we could bring forward some of the most important elements that are now hidden behind a button, like the recruitment menu and the difficulty settings. They should be instantly visible and usable when you go to the Colony Tab.

Old UI on the left, updated UI on the right


Last week, we announced some pretty radical plans to overhaul a lot of the systems in CS. We received a lot of enthusiastic and helpful feedback so that’s good news! The overhaul is becoming very likely.
Our current roadmap looks roughy like this now:

• 0.7.4: An overhaul to make existing UI elements more beautiful and intuitive.
  
• 0.7.5 / 0.7.6 / 0.7.7: New UI elements like a better job management menu, clearer messages and alarms, a decent tutorial, and perhaps even blueprint builders!
  
• 0.8.0: A massive overhaul to the way unlocks and content are structured, with new systems like the Repeating Scientist (To Be Renamed) who processes Data - all planned in such a way that it can smoothly transition to an Industrial Revolution
  
• 0.8.1 (0.9.0?): Industrial content with new features such as multi-block jobblocks, pipes and electricity

Let us know how you feel about these plans and the screenshot with the updated UI!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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A lot of our menus, like the science menu and the stockpile, are “handcrafted” in Unity. Other menus, like the colony menu and a lot of the pop-up menus there, are generated from code. This code can also be used by modders for their own custom menus.

The old code didn’t offer a lot of options, and it resulted in pretty bare-bones menus. Zun is currently working to upgrade this code, giving us more formatting options, allowing us to present them in a more beautiful and intuitive manner. Currently, this doesn’t have any impressive visual results yet, but when it’s done it should pretty much instantly transform a decent part of the UI.

Something else this week did have very concrete results. We’ve had some intense discussions about the current content. Two weeks ago, we also talked about 0.8.0, but we were mostly talking about content to be added pretty much after the end of the current tech tree. But this week, we were talking about radically restructuring the tech tree that’s already in-game. I made a small “map” that explains how the current tech tree feels to me:

Fullscreen From left to right: 1# The banner range upgrades; #2 The stove and related happiness items; #3 The upgrades regarding metals and weapons, culminating in multiple colonies; #4 The health upgrades

The banner range upgrades have a nice, consistent feel to them. It’s clear that recruiting more colonists results in a bigger safe zone. But it’s separated from the rest of the tech tree.

There’s a bunch of “bad” science surrounding the stove. A lot of the unlocks have weird prerequisites related to their predecessors; requiring honey to unlock fish, requiring fish to unlock olives, that kind of thing. And these unlocks are often not useful in isolation: a fisherman is useless without a stove to turn raw fish into edible fish. Thirdly, once you’ve unlocked all stove-related science, you’ve got pretty much all of the happiness items you need to get to the endgame.

Then there’s the health sciences. They’re pretty much disconnected from the rest of the tech tree. They’re a fun diversion for the curious, but not much more than that.

There’s one main line forward, and it starts with the science related to new ores and metals and how to convert them into weapons, added in 0.4.0. When that’s finished, there’s a massive threshold added mostly into 0.7.0, with advanced science bags, gliders, colony starter kits and traders. They’re hard to unlock, and when that’s done, they don’t offer any practical benefit until you’ve actually travelled a long distance and set up a second, distant colony. And then the only purpose is new happiness items - which aren’t really needed when you’ve got an efficient small colony.

The current tech tree isn’t the result of one coherent strategy. Over the time of multiple years we prioritized different problems and tried to fix them with different solutions. The tech tree reflects that: it’s a patchwork that’s pretty disjointed in a lot of places. Some parts rely heavily on science bags, others ignore it pretty much completely. Some parts have very light requirements, while others become a lot more costly pretty randomly.

We want to fix that. The tech tree should be a more unified whole, consistently rewarding the same type of activities. Steps should be short and simple in the beginning, but should smoothly grow harder but more rewarding over time. Each unlock in the tech tree should be useful by itself, and shouldn’t rely on three following unlocks before they have tangible results.

The tech tree shouldn’t be over when you’ve got 150 colonists. One way to do this is by extending the tech tree with meaningful, rewarding content, and we definitely want to do that. But we also want to make it more “labor intensive” to reach the end of the game. Even the current content should require more colonists.

The game should still be challenging when your colony grows, so currently, there’s a lot of costs that scale as you recruit more colonists. Every new colonist requires food, happiness items and it will attract more monsters (requiring you to produce ammo and recruit guards).

But balancing this is pretty hard. Some (more experienced) players will run very efficient colonies, where all colonists spend their time on important tasks. Other colonies won’t be like that, with long walking distances, idling colonists and colonists crafting items that aren’t very relevant. These could just be inexperienced players, or players focused on building a beautiful colony instead of a hyper efficient one. If the game is balanced properly for this second category, the first category will quickly build up huge surpluses and won’t encounter much challenge as their colony grows bigger. They’ll also reach the end of the tech tree much quicker.

So we’re thinking of introducing more “fixed costs”. Instead of pushing for efficiency by making colonists themselves very expensive, we want to make “progress” itself more expensive: an example would be the Repeating Scientists who use data (talked about it in this blog) , but also by making science and “permanent items” like job blocks and weapons more expensive (more labor intensive, especially). This should negate the negative effects mentioned above. To balance out these increased costs, we might make the "daily cost" of having a colonist a bit lower, with for example a bit less happiness items being required, especially at the start.

Implementing this requires us to overhaul the entire tech tree and the full production chain. We’re reconsidering the costs of all science and all items. If we’re going to do this, it’ll be a massive overhaul, and we hope it’ll be worth it. But your opinion is important. What do you think of this analysis? Do you recognize it in your own playthroughs and do you think it’s important to fix these? Or are we completely missing the mark and/or overstating the negative consequences? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Last week’s blog received a lot of comments! There were many enthusiastic replies, which is awesome to see. Others were a bit more critical - which is also useful!

A common request was adding “daily production/consumption stats” to the statistics menu. This is something we'd also love to see. One of the future updates should add a "Daily Report" with a lot of detailed info on what has happened in the past 24 (in-game) hours: how many monsters spawned, how were they killed, what was produced and consumed? This data will also be presented in the statistics menu.

Some other concerns were also mentioned in the comments. Some people want us to polish up the basics a bit more. Working on it :) Others worry that the transition from current tech to industrial tech might be too abrupt. We’re trying to make it a smooth, natural progression!

Second half is a mock-up, it's not in-game!

This week, work on 0.7.4 has started. We’re working to make the UI simultaneously more beautiful and more intuitive. The image above shows the current 0.7.3 UI in the first half and a mock-up for what it could look like in the second half. The menu won’t look exactly like that in 0.7.4, but it’s roughly the improvement we’re striving for. We’ve got quite a lot of UI elements that are looking pretty shabby and/or aren’t intuitive for newer players. That shouldn’t be true anymore when we release 0.7.4.

[h2]Covid-19[/h2]
We live in the northernmost part of the Netherlands, in a province called “Groningen”. Sadly enough, Covid-19 did arrive here, but the south of the Netherlands was hit way more severely. After the lockdown started, the amount of infections has dropped rapidly, and it seems the entire province of Groningen hasn’t seen a single new confirmed case of Covid-19 in a week! [Scratch that we had one new case][Double-scratch seems to be two] New rules that were implemented during the lockdown are starting to be lifted again. We hope it’ll be possible to simultaneously get closer to pre-corona life and keep the virus under control. How are you holding up? Have the virus and the measures to prevent it disrupted life in the region where you live? Are things getting back to normal or is it getting worse?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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